Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Saturday 1 March 2014

'The Banality of Evil'

is not nearly so banal
as the banality
of normality.

5 comments:

Bearz said...

But how evil is the banality of normality?

Wofl said...

Well that is the question ! How evil is banality ? how evil is normality ?
Food for thought.

Jindra K. Hrdlička said...

Each person on the planet has their own sense of "normal". What's normal for one person is abnormal for someone else. With no concrete list of details of what's "normal" and only a generalized definition of what the word means, "normal" doesn't exist.
I know you have a tendency to attach evil to a lot of things, even to a non-existing stuff :)

Wofl said...

The phrase "Banality of Evil" was used by Hannah Arendt in her comments on the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief executors of the Nazi 'Final Solution' of the 'Jewish Problem' (1963).

'Normality' is absolutely not different for everyone. It means 'doing what everyone else does at any particular time', and in the modern world, this becomes less and less variable. I have devoted my life to quietly combatting normality... It is the key to my insane happiness in the face of evil normality !

Bearz said...

If normality means 'doing what everyone else does at the time' then
1-where there groups then normality will always exist.
2-normality will always be changing, because time and materials change what people do together.
3-relatively rarely does one normality recognise its own group think, but it is more likely see other normalities as group think than itself.

Thus 'combating normality' is about pointing out how relative normalities fail to recognise their similarities and finding your own point of view, at some distance from them.